"Cosmos" and One More Telling of the Tired Myth

Seth MacFarlane, well known atheist and cartoonist, is the executive producer of the remake of “Cosmos,” which recently made its national debut. The first episode featured, along with the science, an animated feature dealing with the sixteenth century Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by Church officials. A brooding statue of Bruno stands today in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome on the very spot where the unfortunate friar was put to death. In MacFarlane’s cartoon, Bruno is portrayed as a hero of modern science, and church officials are, without exception, depicted as wild-eyed fanatics and unthinking dogmatists. As I watched this piece, all I could think was...here we go again.

Avatars of the modern ideology feel obligated to tell their great foundation myth over and over, and central to that narrative is that both the physical sciences and liberal political arrangements emerged only after a long twilight struggle against the reactionary forces of religion, especially the Catholic religion. Like the effigies brought out to be burned on Guy Fawkes Day, the bugbear of intolerant and violent Catholicism has to be exposed to ridicule on a regular basis.

I will leave to the side for the moment the issue of liberal politics’ relation to religion, but I feel obliged, once more, to expose the dangerous silliness of the view that Catholicism and the modern sciences are implacable foes. I would first observe that it is by no means accidental that the physical sciences in their modern form emerged when and where they did, that is to say, in the Europe of the sixteenth century. The great founders of modern science—Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, etc.—were formed in church-sponsored universities where they learned their mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Moreover, in those same universities, all of the founders would have imbibed the two fundamentally theological assumptions that made the modern sciences possible, namely, that the world is not divine—and hence can be experimented upon rather than worshipped—and that the world is imbued with intelligibility—and hence can be understood. I say that these are theological presumptions, for they are both corollaries of the doctrine of creation. If God made the world in its entirety, then nothing in the world is divine; and if God made the world in its entirety, then every detail of the world is marked by the mind of the Creator. Without these two assumptions, the sciences as we know them will not, because they cannot, emerge.

In fact, from the intelligibility of the universe, the young Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) constructed an elegant argument for the existence of God. The objective intelligibility of the finite world, he maintained, is explicable only through recourse to a subjective intelligence that thought it into being. This correspondence, in fact, is reflected in our intriguing usage of the word “recognition” (literally, to think again) to designate an act of knowledge. In employing that term, we are at least implicitly acknowledging that, in coming to know, we are re-thinking what has already been thought by the creative intelligence responsible for the world’s intelligibility. If Ratzinger is right, religion, far from being science’s enemy, is in fact its presupposition.

Secularist ideologues will relentlessly marshal stories of Hypatia, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others—all castigated or persecuted by church people who did not adequately grasp the principles I have been laying out. But to focus on these few exceptional cases is grossly to misrepresent the history of the relationship between Catholicism and the sciences.

May I mention just a handful of the literally thousands of Catholic clerics who have made significant contributions to the sciences? Do you know about Fr. Jean Picard, a priest of the seventeenth century, who was the first person to determine the size of the earth to a reasonable degree of accuracy? Do you know about Fr. Giovanni Battista Riccioli, a seventeenth century Jesuit astronomer and the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free-falling body? Do you know about Fr. George Searle, a Paulist priest of the early twentieth century who discovered six galaxies? Do you know about Fr. Benedetto Castelli, a Benedictine monk and scientist of the sixteenth century, who was a very good friend and supporter of Galileo? Do you know about Fr. Francesco Grimaldi, a Jesuit priest who discovered the diffraction of light? Do you know about Fr. George Coyne, a contemporary Jesuit priest and astrophysicist, who for many years ran the Vatican Observatory outside of Tucson? Perhaps you know about Fr. Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian monk who virtually invented modern genetics, and about Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, a twentieth century Jesuit priest who wrote extensively on paleontology, and about Fr. Georges Lemaître, the formulator of the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins.

Can we please, once and for all, dispense with the nonsense that Catholicism is the enemy of the sciences? When we do, we’ll expose the Seth MacFarlane telling of the story for what it really is: not scientific history but the basest sort of anti-Catholic propaganda.

Mr. Shakespeare, You appear to avoid Bishop Barron's primary argument in that the Catholic church has promoted the search for truth (physical or otherwise) and through this philosophy has provided a foundation for the western science ( the intial precursors were churchmen, r.e. Bacon). And to this day many Catholic have, and still do contribute to the scientific endevour, with the Church's approval, (regardless of your annoted references). Catholics (clergy no less!.... Le-Maitre?) have contributed to, and continue to participate in the expansion of modern science.

May 28, 2016

David Shakespeare

Catholics historically (before the death of Galileo 1642) had always been, nasty, mean egocentric geocentrists, based on Biblical literal interpretation—Catholic Christian leaders in authority always were geocentric and preached geocentricism. Period. (Source: Encyclopedia of Science and Religion. 2003. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, pp 822.) For anyone in the Catholic Church today to say otherwise is being manipulative and dishonest. Robert Barron’s snarky tone cannot change the fact that the Catholic Church has always embraced, as God inspired, a literal view propagated by the Holy Scriptures—from Aristotle to, Augustin’s cosmology, Dante's ascension outward geocentrically up to heaven, Aquinas’ Christian doctrine of crystalline spheres revolving around what was believed to be an IMMOBILE earth...where Catholics taught that the cosmos was closed and finite (pp. 821-823). This was Church doctrine and dogma for over a 1000 years. There's source, after source, after source...it is offensive to reason for someone to revise these facts otherwise. There’s no such thing as a secularist ideologue. It is a fact that Catholics (and then some Protestant Christians too) believed the earth to be the center of the universe based on a Biblical literal interpretation. Period! End of story… Historically it is justifiable, and correct, and fair to marshal stories of Hypatia, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others as strong evidence that it was science that narrowed the god of the gaps. Theology was never a paragon of knowledge on cosmology. Sorry! Millions of people have suffered at the hands of religious zealots; nonbelievers have been castigated, persecuted by church people who did not adequately ‘yield’ to religious authority on issues just like this. It is dishonest, a lie, and it does disreputable harm for the Church to deny the injustice it has done in its gods name. More to it: God’s Holy Scriptures does NOT, at any time, articulate a heliocentric position (BTW: God tells his chosen people through these prophets all sorts of crazy and inspired stuff—but never passes us an inspired accurate perspective of the cosmos). Instead God passes off all sorts of inane, craziness e.g. laws about: The law not causing pain to a man’s testicles: Deuteronomy 25:11-12 “…If two men are fighting and the wife reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand.” Excommunication for forgetting a holiday: Numbers 9:13 (Perhaps, Catholics, barrow this idea from Jewish culture?) The Lord tells Aaron no alcohol allowed in [church]: Leviticus 10:9 “The LORD then spoke to Aaron, saying, ‘Do not drink wine, at [church]. God tells us not to have sex with a women on her period: Leviticus 20:18. The Lord says not to wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. Leviticus 19:19. And there’s a thousand other crazy things God tells us through his prophets i.e.: Genesis 19:26, Ezekiel 21:10, Genesis 7:21-23, 2 Chronicles 13:15-18, Exodus 12:29, 1 Samuel 6:19, Deuteronomy 13:6-10...ad infinitum...etc...etc...craziness! But at no time does God inform his prophets to inform us that the Sun is at the center of our solar system. Why, not? Easy for God to do! In fact, God tells us through his prophets that the Earth is unmovable, centered, and at the heart of the Universe—WHY do God’s prophets inspire the wrong facts, false details about our existence, and rightful place in the cosmos? The Catholic Church (before the invention of a telescope) had always insisted on a geocentric cosmology or face a heretic’s painful punishment. Hell, fire, and brimstone style... Here’s what Catholics for 1000s of years taught was God’s literal Biblical words: 1 Chronicles 16:30, “Tremble before him, all the earth; yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.” , Psalm 93:1, “Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm. Psalm 104:5, “He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.” Job 26:7, “He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing.” Isaiah 40:22, “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in.” Joshua 10:13, “And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.” Isaiah 45:18, “...who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast…” Hope this helps, friend! God said it...Catholics taught it. A thousand years of Ptolemaic and medieval history proves it. It sucks a lot that Barron resorts to the historical bias of propaganda's spin. Sources: Aristotle. 1945. On the Heavens, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Miller, Ron. 2014. Recentering the Universe : The Radical Theories of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books. Augustine. 1975. Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin. Hawking, Stephen W. 1988. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam. Koyré, Alexander. 1965. Newtonian Studies. London: Chapman and Hall. Plato. 1983. Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin. Whitrow, G. J. 1980. The Natural Philosophy of Time. Oxford: Clarendon Press.﻿